Hi! End-user here. I actually hate it when programmers inflict new “features” upon me without retaining the option to avoid them, and am thoroughly in support of any intervention which forces them to think more carefully before doing so. To any programmers reading this, I would suggest you redirect that energy toward making your code run faster and have fewer bugs, which is IMO a much more valuable intervention.
If a programmer sends you a smaller image file because they are able to use a format that compresses the image, then most of the impact on you as a end-user is not that you are prevent with new features but just that the website loads faster. Today, Firefox seems to also support WebP but there was a time when it didn’t and was lagging behind.
When asking ChatGPT for current examples of what Chrome allows but Firefox doesn’t it gives me the examples:
Temporal API: This API provides better tools for date and time manipulation, addressing many shortcomings of the existing Date object. Chrome has implemented this, but Firefox’s support is still partial and experimental (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Pipeline Operator: This feature, often used in functional programming, allows for easier chaining of functions. While it is available in Chrome (especially in experimental versions like Chrome Canary), it is not yet fully supported in Firefox (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Records and Tuples: These immutable data structures are supported in Chrome but are still not fully available in Firefox. They provide a way to create data structures that cannot be altered, enhancing data integrity and consistency (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Top-Level Await: This feature allows the use of await at the top level of modules, simplifying asynchronous code. Chrome supports this feature fully, while Firefox has partial support and ongoing work to improve it (DailyDev).
Using immutable data structures is for example a way to reduce bugs and not to “inflict new features” on users. Even if your goal is just websites that are faster and have fewer bugs, programmers being able to use these four things is helpful.
In practice the impact on me as an end-user is that if I want to use the WebP for anything I have to rename it to PNG, because programmers were not sufficiently careful about backwards-compatibility as to make the experience seamless. This is, from my perspective, an undesirable outcome and a significant inconvenience. The four things listed sound like they wouldn’t impact my experience except in terms of speed, so I’m tentatively unopposed, but I’m suspicious that it would be WebP all over again.
Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true?
Also, what’s the deal with the linked sources? They don’t mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I’m not a webdev expert.
Why? So more energy is wasted because we can’t move to an image format like WebP that uses less space?
So that programmers have a harder time using new features on the web?
Hi! End-user here. I actually hate it when programmers inflict new “features” upon me without retaining the option to avoid them, and am thoroughly in support of any intervention which forces them to think more carefully before doing so. To any programmers reading this, I would suggest you redirect that energy toward making your code run faster and have fewer bugs, which is IMO a much more valuable intervention.
If a programmer sends you a smaller image file because they are able to use a format that compresses the image, then most of the impact on you as a end-user is not that you are prevent with new features but just that the website loads faster. Today, Firefox seems to also support WebP but there was a time when it didn’t and was lagging behind.
When asking ChatGPT for current examples of what Chrome allows but Firefox doesn’t it gives me the examples:
Temporal API: This API provides better tools for date and time manipulation, addressing many shortcomings of the existing Date object. Chrome has implemented this, but Firefox’s support is still partial and experimental (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Pipeline Operator: This feature, often used in functional programming, allows for easier chaining of functions. While it is available in Chrome (especially in experimental versions like Chrome Canary), it is not yet fully supported in Firefox (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Records and Tuples: These immutable data structures are supported in Chrome but are still not fully available in Firefox. They provide a way to create data structures that cannot be altered, enhancing data integrity and consistency (SitePoint) (DailyDev).
Top-Level Await: This feature allows the use of
await
at the top level of modules, simplifying asynchronous code. Chrome supports this feature fully, while Firefox has partial support and ongoing work to improve it (DailyDev).Using immutable data structures is for example a way to reduce bugs and not to “inflict new features” on users. Even if your goal is just websites that are faster and have fewer bugs, programmers being able to use these four things is helpful.
In practice the impact on me as an end-user is that if I want to use the WebP for anything I have to rename it to PNG, because programmers were not sufficiently careful about backwards-compatibility as to make the experience seamless. This is, from my perspective, an undesirable outcome and a significant inconvenience. The four things listed sound like they wouldn’t impact my experience except in terms of speed, so I’m tentatively unopposed, but I’m suspicious that it would be WebP all over again.
Wait, just checking, when you say you got these examples from ChatGPT, do you know enough to verify that these are true?
Also, what’s the deal with the linked sources? They don’t mention browser differences. Does Firefox not run this 2023 version of Javascript or something? I’m not a webdev expert.